Press release

Galerie Karsten Greve has actively supported the work of Pierrette Bloch since 2011. In this new exhibition entitled Différence et répétition (Difference and repetition), we unveil a novel selection of more than 70 works illustrating the variety of her pioneering artistic approach, based on the reiteration of a gesture that is ever new. A bilingual (French/English) catalogue will be published along with the exhibition. It contains previously unpublished texts by Julie Enckell Julliard (Swiss art historian, curator and art critic and former director of the Musée Jenisch Vevey) and Lucia Pesapane (curator of the exhibition and director of artistic programming at the Monnaie de Paris (Paris Mint)).

Deeply rooted in the practice of drawing, which she brought to the fore of contemporary art research, Pierrette Bloch’s work displays an innovative approach through the artist’s ability to imbue abstraction with a new sensitivity and poetry. Born in 1928, she and the artists of her generation such as Cy Twombly and Pierre Soulages, shared the desire to capture the essence of art by using the morphological components of pictorial art. For over sixty years, dots, lines and the relationships she formed with her surfaces, depending on the material used, were the founding principles of Pierrette Bloch’s work. The artist expressed her creative force through a seemingly silent oeuvre. Her work is characterised by a sparsity of means – ink, oil pastels, pastels and horsehair – and colours – black and white – with which she was able to create an extremely free oeuvre. Her work thus becomes a journey for the gaze, which moves over the surface to the rhythm of a dance created by the relationships between the marks of the creative gesture and the support.

It was towards the end of the 1960s that Pierrette Bloch abandoned painting to explore collage and drawing. While her collages were initially architectonic compositions made of inked, torn pieces of paper layered on hardboard, they evolved in around 1970 to 1972 to integrate bits of drawings she had initially discarded. She cut them using scissors and reassembled the fragments thus obtained in a deconstructed patchwork that thrummed with a new rhythm.